 I'm Holger Liefsson and I will speak about Debian Community, Org. Here, welcome. I'll first say something a bit about me, how I had the idea, inspiration, what I planned for Debian Community and the status. And then I would like to have feedback or a discussion. How many of you are DBM developers? And how many of you are DBM developers? And not an M? Okay, not surprising, it's a Debian developer conference. And how many of you don't want to become DBM developers? Still some people, okay. In fact, most contributors in Debian are not DBM developers. The bug tracking system has 50,000 submitters, email addresses, and there are only 1,000 DBM developers. I used to have this slide to explain, when I first gave this talk, before I was a DBM developer, I was already heavily involved in Debian. I've done all this before I was a developer. So it's possible to work in Debian without being a developer. And another thing about me is that I'm too busy to do this. So I've started Debian Community in January, had some more time in February, and then got distracted by other stuff, mostly Debian Edo and work. So I will not be able to set this up alone. I could, but I know that would take much longer, so I appreciate help. And I cannot write all the content alone. I had the idea in January, and while I was at the Linux conference in Australia, after seeing these two talks from one from Jono Bacon about the Ubuntu community, Jono is the Ubuntu community manager. And it was quite insightful to see how much Ubuntu cares to build communities, to build local communities, and to steer that, so that there's some coordinated effort. And the other talk was by Casey Sierra about passionate users. Both talks are linked on my blog, with this blog post, basically, you need to remember my blog, and then the post 83, or Search for Ubuntu, or whatever. I don't blog about Ubuntu often. And Casey explained from what other communities do to get people involved. She had the example how computer game levels are designed. The first levels are easy, so the people get hooked up to the game, and then it gets harder and harder, and the people try to manage this level and get further. And the same is also with horse training. You can get these, something like this, with different colors, so that you made this and this training with the horse, and the same is with martial arts belts, where you first get a white belt, and then an orange, or green, or whatever, and you get two different levels, and people want to get further with that. And this talk had many good aspects. There was also about passion, motivation, and the flow, what people motivate to dedicate their work to a volunteer project, and the flow, which happens when people code very long, and their mind gets drifted into the code, and if they get interrupted with it, then the concentration goes away. And I think this also happens in Debian. If there's a flame where people are working, and then they suddenly get distracted with flameless, so that also hurts. It's really insightful to see this talk, I highly recommend it. And she works at Sun, and started a Java web forum. There was a Java newsnet group, which was very hostile. People just shouted at each other, and it was not a nice atmosphere to work. And she founded a Java web forum, which had one rule, if you registered to it, which was be nice or be friendly. So the terms of use was, I agreed to be friendly when I used this website. And that was the only terms of use for the website. And the website is a huge success with three million visitors per month or something. And I suggest you really watch these talks. They are really good. You have been following Debian since more than 10 years. And the idea that there's nothing between Debian developers and users is not really new. It pops up quite often. There are some proposals to address this, like this new Debian maintainers idea, where people get upload rights without voting rights or other rights. But this is also, again, a high-level entry point. You need to be able to package. You need to have a package in Debian. It's nothing for starters, really. And also, there are many Debian communities. Debian is, how old? 13 years? Yeah, something like that. But Debian is also a bit scattered around with the resources. So that's another idea that Debian community should give users a single entry point. Now I'll explain the basic ideas I have for Debian community. Also, what Debian community should not be. There should be some rules, but not too many. And Debian developers are welcome in the project, but it's really for the rest of the Debian community. For Debian developers, there's lots of structure. There is everything, so that's not really needed. Yeah, it should not be about reinventing the wheel. There are lots of forums. There are other projects to get people involved. And I don't think Debian community should try to replace that because it works mostly. So the first thing I had was also in Australia. There was a guy who was in NM since two years, and he was from, I think, Colombia. I don't remember really. And he was very happy with his Ubuntu com business card. He had a Ubuntu com business card, and he was really happy. He applied for NM two years ago and didn't make many progress there, but Ubuntu acknowledged his contributions very fast. He got this email address, printed it on this business card and was happy. It was from Sheila. Okay. I could, yeah. Thanks. And I decided to choose the name Debian community org because I think the email address looks fancier than community.debian.net. Somehow, org mailing address are more appealing to most people. And this email address should also be easy to get after some contributions. So that people get involved. But it also should not be a right to have or you should continue to contribute to keep this address. And these rules or guidelines need to be written down. I'll come to that later. And the only thing there really is it should only be used for Debian-related matters. And not for setting up your own business or something. Yeah, the exact how to get an email address needs to be defined soon because people keep asking me or started asking me, I want such an address. And of course I could, there are some people who are Debian developers who want one and they contribute. So I could definitely give that to them. But I want to have the procedure first. There is the idea of karma points or collecting something. So if you file three bucks or fix two or maybe it's five, then you can get such an email address. This needs to be decided soon like I would say within the next month or two and written down and then we can later change it. But to keep this level idea which is from these cases here I talked there should be something. And how to track this, my idea is that people set up a user page on Vicky Debian Community org where they can list what they do in Debian. So then you can see okay this person does this and that and fine. Planets, there are five I think Planet Debian, the normal Planet Debian org and four in different languages but many languages are missing and Planet Debian org is also again only for Debian developers or people in NNM. So my idea is to have one Planet Debian Community org for everybody who has a Debian-related feat and the same then for the different language planets. And t-shirts. Everybody loves t-shirts. They show that you're affiliated with the project. They also adverse the project and they let people identify with it. Then since a month or two there is Debian Art org which now is a source for t-shirts. So I don't think really Debian Community needs to deal with t-shirts. It's also, shipping the t-shirt is really more a business if you do it worldwide so I'm happy to just have it somewhere else. Have the t-shirt under a license so that people can copy modify them and that are the Debian Community t-shirts. And the project needs to be localized because many people especially who are not developers writing code are not so firm with English. So it needs to be localized. This is for the web page, the planets and even the t-shirts should be localized. There is the question how to keep the translations in sync. That was one of the main reasons why I choose Ikiwiki because Ikiwiki is easy to modify very easily. And my idea is to use a technique like the Debian web pages which store in Debian web pages there's the CVS ID in the main English page and then the translated web pages refer to that ID so you can see the translation the German translation is three revisions behind. The additional difficulty will be that in the wiki there will be pages which are more up to date or first created in Spanish or French or other languages. So it's not like the Debian web pages where English is always the master language there will be other main sources but that should be able to define to have another pseudo header which defines which language is the master language. Then Fedora came up with the idea of having ambassadors which are basically I think two people assigned for a country who, what's the word, who represent the project in a specific country. I think AJ brought the idea on Debian project some months ago. I think it's a good idea and it would also be another level which people could try to reach and it would also help because I don't know how the French or Colombian or whatever community looks like. And these local communities there are already local communities which would be useful or not useful it would be very wise to get them involved. There's also already e-mail, other projects provide e-mails too. And if Debian community would only be about e-mail addresses and planets that's too little I think in the long run so that Debian community keeps on as the project. So I thought about what else can be done with that domain basically to provide, give some context. And my idea is to, Debian is very developer centric so the documentation is most often made for unstable or for testing and then stable gets released and the how-to's are scattered all around the net. So my idea is to use Debian community to document really stable to improve the documentation maybe to make video tutorials which is also an idea from Ubuntu and Typeo3 is another web application. They use video tutorials to show users how to do stuff with their project and people are lazy and so they download the video and watch it instead of downloading a how-to and read it. It's strange but it seems to really work. I also want to use wiki-debian community or do not mess up with the Debian wiki. The Debian wiki is meant for not really meant but it's mostly used by developers and I could imagine that many users are afraid to modify stuff there to just deal with the stuff that the great developers do. And I think that to avoid this what happens with Debian documentation often that people write the documentation for certain state then they move on and the documentation becomes outdated so I propose to just work in slash edge to document really edge and when Lenny is released maybe copy the documentation over what is still usable but restart from scratch and then there are two documentations. Also it will be lots of links because there are many great how-tos on the web which are just on many different web pages. So a link collection can be useful. This was also discussed already on the mailing list in probably February. There's a mailing list on Alios where you can read about this. This is the newbie doc project on Berlioz the guy who is the only one left not only one he was the most active there there are two or three other contributors but the project is not so active anymore and he was quite happy to join Debian community and provide the documentation there for a newbie view. One idea is also to document how hardware is supported which has recently happened on Wiki Debian org where there are for the notebooks pages for the different models but I'm happy to hear other ideas what to do there. FlameWorst are big in Debian not sure how many of you have been annoyed by FlameWorst in the last months in the last half year since using Debian? Who likes them? In real life the basics are really simple just smile at someone and then he or she will smile back and it's much easier to avoid FlameWorst than on mailing list which are publicly archived but in generally I think being friendly also works on the internet there will still be FlameWorst always but I think it's possible to keep them down more. So I think this idea of one simple rule I really like that it's really really important and I think it's really all that is needed but of course there will be people who will not be friendly who will flame, who will behave in a way that's not nice, not appropriate stops the work going on because it distracts. I'm not sure how to word that but I want to have this defined because I think we need it but I also think it's not needed in the beginning just to keep in mind that we really need it so I hope it will be set up in half a year that the different aspects are defined and I have it on my agenda to really integrate that and I'm happy for suggestions how to handle it but I also want to have the rule simple and not a huge catalogue, constitution and of course also people will just sometimes say you idiot and that's not really a problem so there's three strikes as far too many if you solve the FlameWorst then it also should be fine in my opinion and of course the long term goal is also to become an official Debian project at the moment it's still in my idea the domain is registered on my name but I'm happy to give it away but it's also not needed at the moment just something else to keep in mind I started design polls in February I've got four more or less finished designs and that one from Valessio Brito who also made the Debian 7 logos and artwork was the one I and others liked the most I made a poll at Foster and I'm also fine against changing the design later it's nothing static in fact the machine where Debian Community Orcus running is called Bikeshet from this old BSD mailing list post that was about, that was mainly not a joke but to explain that if you set up, do a web design or set up a simple server then not of people say oh you can do it like this or you can do it like this like everybody can build a Bikeshet and if you build a power plant then you just present the plans and everybody says okay that's great plan let's make it like this so Bikeshet is the name to reflect that the people who do the work should decide that in the detail I'm open, the whole configuration of the machine is maintained with five fully automatic installation the configuration is in the subversion project in Alios so every project member can change the configuration there will be just little less people who are able to actually deploy the configuration but everybody can make the changes the machine is up since two months the new one it's hosted at the University of Gent we have the Alios project which is D-minus community because Debian Community was too long for Alios project names there's a subversion project the two mailing list and the ISC channel Joey helped me yesterday to finish the setup thanks of Ikiwiki which we still use a local SVN which I still want to either to get on Alios so that we use the commit mailing list there and the backup resources and other stuff but to have it editing faster it worked better that's the detail I need help to set this up also the next step now that Ikiwiki is running is to set up the mail service set up the planets can be done in parallel and then the project from the infrastructure is there and then it's only the content remaining the best way to get involved is to become an Alios project member so that you can work on the configuration or just get a wiki account and work on the content there's the ISC channel which I would favor to use for communication and the mailing list yeah, that's it thanks for your time and your work on Debian in general any questions, suggestions, discussions? so well I was there already during the first day when you made a first talk about Debian community and I was really thinking about what could be the killer feature of that whole idea what could make actually people really do want to come and join it we might have found that with Paul Wise the idea would be to have a database of user reviews of packages like because well it actually came to us because a lot of people that, well not a lot but people started to get to work on packages.debian.org again, so like to integrate better have a better layout, integrate data tags integrate data tags with automatic suggestions and the page is going to slowly getting more and more like Amazon web page where they present their books and you have suggestions and you also have user reviews with a little star mark and some well text that could be really good to have users review Debian packages on a lot of different points like for users themselves but also for QA because we will have another way to actually know which user are really interested into a package which will not be on the you know popcorn which is quite have a low signal actually and I think like to encourage users to actually review packages through Debian community will get well the whole process really bootstrapped well because there's a lot of users that actually I have seen at least Google for some free software application and find that it's actually really already in Debian because they managed to get like the packages at Debian.org pages are fairly well ranked already on Google and they managed to get to this page and they see oh someone has made a review well I would like to make a review of such other packages so that was one of the idea but I think it will really fit and well might be quite interesting to working into making this happen actually You're welcome to do so What do you think about the general idea? Well you said something about how to define the guidelines for behaving in this community and something about define the positive process and to me it seems really like what has been done with the Debian community guidelines by Ariko so I'm wondering if you have considered just adopting them as a positive process to be the basis for Debian community.org Yeah they are in fact linked on the web page I think they are really good but I think they are too long even if they are really short. There are only two pages or something but as a general rule I think they are too long I want to keep it really simple for that and of course encourage to longer documents there is much longer text which are still useful You said you wanted to integrate a lot of existing forums and communities in Debian already Do you have a specific idea on how to get communities that already have maybe their own well not code of conduct but they have their own way of behaving maybe inside Debian community there is all these maybe rules that didn't apply before There is not much which in my opinion Debian community has, there is a mailing list which is for the discussion about the project itself but it's more about the infrastructure side and should not become a general Debian helpline like the IRC channel should not be that people join and ask how do I get my hardware configured for existing communication channels be it IRC channels be it web forums which many users like to use all the mailing lists and the specific rules from there still applies so if the Argentinian community is very into flaming they can do that on their Argentinian Debian IRC channel and if the other community is doing that then it's fine it's mostly on the wiki it's also if somebody writes with the Debian community mailing, Debian community org mail address on the Debian mailing list I don't think that the Debian community org guidelines should apply there it's a Debian mailing list and they just use it just if they really completely abuse it which then maybe but I think in general Debian community should more a meeting point or not a connecting point and use the existing stuff especially for forums there is forums Debian which is really good has I forgot 9000 users or more there are many users in this forum which are happy there so I don't want to set up a new forum or new mailing list that doesn't make sense so first of all I must say I'm really satisfied that you are doing this work it seems to be a very good effort to make the Debian community more visible for the Debian developers as such I'm the popularity contest maintainer and I've been amazed reading the developer mailing list that some Debian developers actually believe that unstable and testing was more used than the stable version of Debian that they actually drop the stable version luckily now with actually it's obvious that at least three times more are using the stable version than the unstable version and I hope your community can prove that the Debian community is a lot larger than the developer community I have a suggestion maybe if you are the person who makes the decision about whether people have violated the rules too much that's a pretty hot spot so how about setting up a anonymous place well the name needs to to go to that place but not to be publicized but anytime somebody feels like anyone has been flamed personally rather than technically you have a certain number of those that you collect and then finally you give the first warning and if you get more of them you get the second warning and so forth so it's not just your decision it's a matter of the community complaining because somebody is wasting our time with personal induendos rather than something productive I definitely don't want to be the person deciding their who's misbehaving definitely not alone there must be some procedure, some committee some something and this is one implementation proposal there will be others and I think I want to write them down in the wiki now that the wiki is up since yesterday until yesterday the web page was static HTML pages now it's a wiki so then people can write down their proposals and in three months, half a year nine months when the other stuff is up and running we can do this for the moment I think I don't expect many flames or idiots just coming right now so I think this can be solved a bit later I think just in general should be clear that not everything will be tolerated so for now I think it's fine but I'm happy if you write down your proposal now because in some time we will need to come back to that but I have a problem with the name Debian Community personally I would have assumed that the Debian Community is Debian.org and also in the same way let's say it's another question it's I would have thought that anybody who contributes should actually be part of Debian.org but this is not the case there's only been to my knowledge one developer who became a developer for translation work and also this Valessio Brito who made the artwork maybe I think he should be get an official if he wants it of course an official affiliation with Debian but there is no way that an artist at the moment can become a Debian developer he needs to learn how to package software which I don't think every artist wants to do and I'm all for moving this to community.debian.org this is definitely my long-term goal to get rid of this domain and use community.debian.org or maybe maybe the other name would be user.community.debian.org because there is of course many communities in Debian already but Debian.org is very developer centric and the idea of Debian community is good but what about inside Debian creating another class of users of people belonging to Debian but not being Debian developer having something else for instance not voting for what is about technical choices but maybe some other kind of guidelines yeah I think it's good I'm happy to see that it happens like this Debian maintainers who can upload packages and have no voting rights and can only upload their packages being discussed, worked on and implemented but this is again just before technical people this again Valessi was not there or other artists or translators or whatever other contributors and I think it's okay to go different ways there are many goals which are similar but target different aspects so I think it's a bit different I would like to see Debian contributors for people like translators and artists or Debian artists in some ways are Debian developers but this needs to become in Debian this needs to constitution change and this is just a different approach to create something from the it's a bit outside Debian like there are many projects start outside of Debian like the whole Debian.net domain is outside Debian officially that are single developers or group of developers or works and sometimes they get into Debian officially and sometimes they don't and good things usually get into Debian so I definitely want to get this into Debian but I don't want to start it in Debian I want to start it outside and yeah I think that the past years show that every most of most of all new infrastructure projects that have been successful have been started outside of Debian in this sense that they weren't hosted at the beginning at the Debian org machine this might be not an ideal solution but it is a fact I think services like the wiki I think popcorn all stuff has started at outside of the Debian infrastructure and has moved there when people saw that it was successful to show us the code approach works normally where we were we might manage to make this more flexible or more open in the future but we haven't managed so far so I think the approach the toga has chosen is a wise one it might be not ideal one but it has a good chance of success and I wouldn't say that of many other approaches that we could take time is out as I see from the back thank you for coming hope you join the efforts and have fun the rest of Debian